Tin Swift

“Not well at all,” the captain lied cheerily. “But if I get my hands on the Holder, I’m going to march right up the hill and sit down to tea with the gentleman himself.

“We’ll need to patch the Swift enough to get her to a repair site,” he continued. “Old Jack’s isn’t too far off. We’ll have to do it quiet and slow. Crawl the cliffs and stay out of the clears, but we might make it by nightfall.”

“Then what?” Cedar asked.

“Then I drop you and yours off at the nearest town, we shake hands and let our paths take us where they may.”

Cedar didn’t think there were towns in these parts big enough to offer up the mounts and supplies they’d need to make it to Kansas. There might be a doctor for Rose, but if what Alun had said was true, they’d need the Holder to get that piece of tin out of her.

He’d promised the Madders he’d find the Holder for them. And he planned on doing just that. But he’d also promised he’d do anything necessary to get Rose the medical attention she needed. This was his last bargaining chip for her life.

“I can find it,” Cedar said.

Hink had taken three strides back toward the Swift, but he stopped dead.

“Find what?”

“The Holder.” He’d promised to find it for the Madders, but he had promised no man he’d give it into their possession. Wasn’t much promising he’d give it to Captain Hink either. Only that he’d look and find. After that, there’d be bargains to be made.

“I’ve seen it. I’ve smelled it. I know what it is. I can find it.”

Hink turned around, his head tipped just a little, as if he wasn’t clear that he was hearing correctly.

“I’m to take your word on this, Mr. Hunt?”

“If you think it’s a valuable opportunity.”

“Huh.” Captain Hink tucked his thumbs in the rigging gear at his hips. “What would it cost me to hire your services?”

“I find the Holder, and you take us to Kansas as fast as your ship can fly.”

“To Mrs. Lindson’s family?”

“That’s right.”

“Are you sure you have your bargain in order?” Captain Hink asked.

“I’m sure.”

The captain started off toward the ship again. “Most men would ask for the payment first, and service second.”

“I’m not most men.”

“So there’s a reason you want to find the Holder before taking Mrs. Lindson to her home?”

“Yes.”

“And what reason is that, Mr. Hunt?”

“Rose Small will die if I don’t.”

Cedar was watching Hink in profile as he said those words. The captain had placed his hand on the ship’s door. But his shoulders pulled back and his chin jerked up.

“Are you a doctor, Mr. Hunt?” he asked.

“No.”

“Then why should I believe your prognosis?”

“Because she has a piece of the Holder in that wound.”

“Impossible.” He turned. “The Holder can’t be broken. Each piece has been constructed so that nothing short of the fires of hell can melt it, no hammer can break it, and no vise can bend it. It’s made of Strange elements, Mr. Hunt. It isn’t just a tinker’s toy.”

For a man who had only seen sketches of it, he seemed to know an awful lot about it.

“It’s broken into seven pieces,” Cedar said, watching his eyes, the pace of his breathing. The Holder meant more to the captain than just a fancy bauble he could bargain with the president for over tea. The Holder was important enough to him that even implying it had been broken, tampered with, possibly destroyed, made him angry.

Not, not just angry. It made him fearful.

He had something on the line in finding the Holder, or in keeping it whole.

“Someone broke it into smaller bits,” Cedar said. “This one piece of it, at least. Someone who found this section of it tinkered with it. And I don’t think it’s an accident. That piece inside Miss Small was meant to kill. I think it was meant to kill me.”

“Are you so important that someone would destroy a weapon of that magnitude just to kill you? Isn’t a bullet good enough to stop you, Mr. Hunt?”

“I bleed,” Cedar said. “I can die. But I don’t do either easily.”

Hink narrowed his eyes, reassessing Cedar. Cedar waited. Let him make his own conclusions. Cedar had survived fatal wounds, from many of which he still carried the scars. The shift to wolf in the full moon sped up his healing to a remarkable degree.

He was a hard man to kill.

“Yet you’ll put the Holder in my hands for a ride on my ship,” Captain Hink said. “Not sure I’d trust a man who would hand over that weapon to the first sky rat he took ship with.”

“You’re not a sky rat,” Cedar said. “You’re the president’s man.”

Hink tugged the door open. “Says you.” He stepped into the Swift, Cedar right behind him.

The relief from the cold was a blessing, even though the interior of the ship was barely warmer than the frigid morning. At least there was no wind.

“Tell me I’m wrong,” Cedar said.

Captain Hink held his gaze for a long moment. Then he strode off to the front of the ship. “It’s half past dawn, you lazy slacks,” he said. “Get up, men, we have wings to mend.”

The men were already up, already busy stowing bedrolls and strapping the cots to the walls and overhead storage. They didn’t do much more than give the captain a glance, familiar with his moods as only a long-standing crew could be.

Wil, next to Rose’s hammock, whined. Rose was awake, though she stared at the ceiling and held as still as she could. Her coloring was off, a strange gray paleness in the shadows of her face.

Cedar walked over to her.

“Mr. Hunt?” It was Mae.

Cedar glanced at Rose, who didn’t appear to have heard Mae’s soft whisper. She blinked, though, and was breathing steady, if a little shallow.

Maybe Mae could ease her pain with herbs.

He walked around the hammock to where Mae sat on the blankets on the floor. She had one hand on the tatting shuttle around her neck, the other clenched in a fist as if she were trying to hold on to the fabric of this waking world, worried that if she let go, she might slip back into dreams.

“Morning, Mrs. Lindson,” Cedar said, kneeling in front of her.

It took her some time to respond. Some time to actually move her eyes away from staring at things he could not see in the middle distance between them to seeing him only an arm’s reach in front of her.

“We’re not in the sky,” she said.

“We landed. Safe. You helped the captain with it. Do you remember?”

Her eyes flicked across his face as if trying to see him through so many other images. “We were falling.”

“Yes. But we didn’t fall. You cast a spell, Mrs. Lindson. You touched the captain.”

“No,” she said.

Cedar paused. She sounded afraid. He wasn’t sure if she was telling him no, or saying it to the voices of the sisters in her head.

“I didn’t touch him,” she said. “Tell me I didn’t touch him. Please.”

He could lie. She would find comfort in it. But he didn’t know what kind of spell she had cast.